HBBH+BH
According to their website, “The new UBC Student Union Building will aim high: to empower, to advocate, to lead by example with ecological, social and financial sustainability. It will be accessible and diverse. It will be an inspirational, dignified space, at home in an exciting landscape” HBBH+BH is a partnership between HBBH and BH. HBBH is responsible for the Marine Drive Residences on Campus.
Bing Thom Architects
“Since 1980, Bing Thom Architects (BTA) has been collaborating with and advising cultural institutions, corporations, universities, governments, developers and communities around the world to help them successfully achieve their building aspirations” (From the Bing Thom Website)
Busby Perkins+Will Architects
According to the Facebook page of Busby Perkins+Will (BP+W), they were “Established in 1984 by Peter Busby in Vancouver, British Columbia, Busby Perkins+Will is an integrated architecture, interiors, and planning firm recognized for its leadership with clients in Corporate + Commercial + Civic, Healthcare, Higher Education, K-12 Education and Science + Technology. The firm is committed to sustainability and green building design, creating modern, functional, and flexible spaces, utilizing the latest, most efficient technology to meet our clients ever-changing needs and desires”
Bunting Coady Architects
Bunting Coady had the pleasure of being first architects to present to the students this afternoon. They touched on a variety of different topics and were very through with their presentation. According to their website, “We create living, breathing buildings®. Bunting Coady Architects is an innovative practice with a global reputation for creating high performance buildings and sustainable architecture. We have won over 50 awards for design quality and building performance and have more square footage of LEED® NC Gold certified institutional and commercial projects than any other firm in North America.”
We’ve uploaded and posted links to all of the reports arising from the AMS Electoral Fraud investigation on our Twitter feed but since not everyone is twitter-savvy just yet, here are the links to:
Final Report from Isabel Ferreras (Elections Administrator)
Report from Forensic Data Recovery (Independent Auditing Firm)
Revised Elections Results presented in a somewhat awkward format.
Final cost to the AMS: currently estimated at $42,000-43,000.
This is part one of a two-part editorial series on the recently revealed AMS Electoral Fraud.
While many of our readers have probably read the preliminary report issued by the Elections Committee, and were possibly even present at the last Council meeting, there hasn’t been a detailed technical explanation provided about exactly how the system was broken. Through brief discussions with members of the EC I believe I now understand how the attack occurred.
The crux of the matter is that student numbers were not validated during the final submission phase, which allowed for a trivial exploit of the system. Due to the simplicity of this hack, I remain deeply concerned about the validity of any of the election results, and I will be hesitant to accept their accuracy even following the final auditor’s report.
I would however like to emphasize that I’m not trying to tear down or belittle the work that this year’s EC did. This year’s elections were probably the smoothest and best-organized elections I have seen during my time at UBC, with this one exception. It is a new system, and mistakes do happen; albeit a rather titanic one in this case. That aside, I think the response following the discovery of the exploit has been handled very well, and I appreciate the levels of public disclosure.
More detailed and technical analysis after the jump.
With impeccable timing, the AMS chose the last Friday of the reading break to post a press release regarding allegations of voting irregularities in the last round of AMS elections. Due to the complete absence of details in the press release and the high potential for scandal, there has been quite a bit of speculation about what could possibly have gone on.
I’ll tell you now: I don’t actually know what’s going on, but at this point it seems fairly safe to say that electoral fraud has in fact occurred.
The people in the know are not talking. But there are some interesting tidbits that have emerged indicating that this Wednesday’s council meeting should be full of intrigue.
Here are the results from continuous VFM thusfar, and from the one-time VFM in interactive graph form!
The real winner at the end of the day, I would say, is the gossip rag AMS Confidential, who managed to create themselves partway through continuous VFM and eventually surpassed the Radical Beer Tribune in terms of total cash out.
It remains hard to get a firm grasp over the one-time VFM results, due to the limited information we now have. What we do know, is that on average, students allocated $1334 with their vouchers. This means a high degree of non-participation in one-time VFM, as this number should be at least $2000 if participation were 100%. If the history of one-time tells us anything though, it’s that results are hard to predict, and the characteristics you’d expect to be predictors aren’t that strong.
Analysis by Tim remains as true today as it did three years ago: there are different niches for the blogs to fill, but at the end of the day, the real benefit of one-time VFM is now the electorate can generally expect better-researched candidates.
We’ve been in talks with the Elections Committee to get more detailed results from the elections, as we beget further analysis. We’re hoping they get released to all soon, so we can try to get a better feeling on what exactly the results mean.
Ignore the false reports, the elections committee just announced we’re over 6500!
Huge kudos to the elections committee. It appears a combination of VFM and a new elections voting website has make for a sustained increase in turnout. See you all at the Gallery for results!
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